DAILY ALERT

U.S. Blasts PA on Attack Probe - Khaled Abu Toameh and Janine Zacharia (Jerusalem Post)
Gen. Musa Arafat, commander of the PA's National Security Forces in the Gaza Strip, said Wednesday that the PA knows the identities of the perpetrators of last October's attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy in which three Americans were killed.
However, Arafat said the PA would not act against the suspects while fighting with Israel continues.
"We find Musa Arafat's statement...to be totally unacceptable and outrageous," a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.
"The U.S. has consistently demanded that the PA take action to locate, apprehend, and bring to justice the killers of our three colleagues, since the deadly October 15, 2003, attack on embassy personnel in Gaza."
"If it is true that the PA knows the identities of the murderers, we expect immediate action to be taken to arrest, prosecute, and convict them."

Syrian Professor: "Terrorism Nests Within Us as Muslims and We Must Exorcise It" (Al-Safir-Lebanon/MEMRI)
Mundir Badr Haloum, a lecturer at a Syrian University, wrote a column stating that Muslims today are responsible for terrorism around the globe, and calling for Islamic religious reform.
"The victims are butchered in the Islamic way... Christians, Buddhists, and Jews....After all, they are only infidels, fuel for the blaze, enemies, or potential enemies, or the friends of enemies, or their neighbors."
"It is Islam that adorns television screens with body parts....Islam - whether those who praise its mercies like it or not - is the foul odor of the putrefaction of Islamic history."
"What gets passed on from generation to generation is the belief in legal rulings that forbid thought and permit killing.... Religious Muslims prepare an offering to heaven - a fresh bit of human flesh."

Ford-Funded NGO Leads Demonization of Israel
(NGO Monitor)
Founded in 1983, and based in the U.S. with 23,000 members, MADRE
describes itself as an "international women's
human rights organization that works in partnership with women's community-based groups to develop long-term solutions to the crisis they face."
In practice, however, MADRE's activities reflect an extremist political and
ideological agenda that also justifies terror.

Mideast Peace Plan's Sponsors Dismayed at Lack of Progress
Secretary of State Colin Powell joined with envoys from Europe, Russia, and the UN on Wednesday to express "deep concern" about the lack of progress in easing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The envoys went a bit further than in past statements in expressing dismay over Israel's failure to freeze settlements or improve conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank, and over the Palestinians' failure to prepare for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Officials said there had been plans for a separate meeting of Palestinian representatives and the Arab, European, and American officials who together subsidize the Palestinian budget with more than $1 billion annually.
But a meeting to discuss how the Palestinians could prepare to take over the houses, schools, hospitals, and other facilities Israel would be leaving behind in Gaza was canceled because of a Palestinian decision to boycott it.
Powell withheld judgment on news reports from Jerusalem quoting Israeli officials as saying they reserved the right to attack Iranian nuclear weapons sites.
"I am not aware of any plans to attack Iran," Powell said. "Every nation has all options available to it."
(New York Times)
See also Secretary Powell's Press Conference (White House)
See also Israel Seeks Cooperation in Peace Process
"The Palestinians were never willing to implement their commitments to the road map," Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Wednesday, as he called on the Palestinians to cooperate in Mideast peacemaking.
(AP/Washington Post)

Zarqawi's Mentor Killed in U.S. Air Strike, Saudi Wahhabi Roots Noted
The spiritual mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in a U.S. air strike, associates and relatives said Wednesday.
Omar Youssef Jumah, known as Abu Annas al-Shami, died last Friday west of Baghdad. Shami called himself the grand mufti, or spiritual guide, of Zarqawi's Tawhid wal Jihad group.
In edicts published on Islamist web sites, Shami said Islam permitted the beheading of hostages who cooperated with the U.S. military.
"Whenever a major kidnapping would take place, they would take from him a ruling on how to handle the hostage according to religious sharia teachings," one Islamist activist said.
Shami's militancy was shaped by four years as a religious seminary student in Saudi Arabia, where he fell under the influence of the strict Wahhabi brand of Islam before returning to Jordan in 1991.
(Asia News-Italy)

News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:

Palestinian Terrorists Kill Three IDF Soldiers in Gaza - Amos Harel
Palestinian gunmen killed three IDF soldiers and wounded a fourth Thursday near the southern Gaza settlement of Morag. Three gunmen were killed. Heavy fog made it possible for the terrorists to reach the outpost.
(Ha'aretz)

Palestinian Woman Suicide Bomber Kills Two Border Policemen in Jerusalem, Injures 30
Border Policemen Yonatan Tahio, 20, and Menashe Komemi, 19, were killed Wednesday when a woman suicide bomber exploded near the French Hill junction in Jerusalem. Eyewitnesses said the bomber tried to pass the two on her way to a crowded hitchhiking post, but Tahio tried to search her belongings. The two began arguing and the bomber then detonated the explosives. "At the hitchhiking post there were dozens of people, and it was clear that a larger disaster had been averted,"
said Haim Weingarten, a rescue service volunteer at the scene.
(Ha'aretz)
See also Jerusalem Bombing a Reminder that Calm is Artificial - Arieh O'Sullivan
With anywhere between 30 and 50 warnings a day, the sense of calm is artificial. It is the product of a relentless campaign by Shin Bet agents and soldiers manning roadblocks, by attack helicopter pilots and special forces and others in uniform who have killed, arrested, or run underground Palestinians determined to wipe us out of existence.
The latest Palestinian polls show that 60% back suicide bombings inside Israel.
By stopping the bomber, the two Border Policemen performed like heroes, alas at a terrible cost. But because of them, many families who could have awoken this morning with their lives shattered will instead continue with their normal lives.
(Jerusalem Post)

Palestinian Rockets Wound Four in Sderot
Palestinians fired two rockets at Sderot in Israel on Thursday. One damaged a home and another landed near a school. Two Israelis were wounded from shrapnel and two more from shock.
(Yediot Ahronot-Hebrew)

Israel Threatens IAEA Boycott - Yossi Melman
Israel has threatened to boycott an international conference on a nuclear-free Middle East, scheduled for January 2005 by the International Atomic Energy Agency, if a resolution calling Israel a nuclear threat is not removed from the agenda, Gideon Frank, director of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, said Wednesday. (Ha'aretz)

Doing Business With Terrorists - Rachel Ehrenfeld
While the U.S. is right to criticize the EU, which according to William Pope, a State Department anti-terrorism coordinator, "has been reluctant to take steps to block the assets of charities linked to Hamas and Hizballah, even though these groups repeatedly engage in deadly terrorist attacks, and the charitable activities help draw recruits," the U.S. can do more to enforce its own laws to prevent American companies from doing business with terrorists. Terrorist websites and TV broadcasts are allowed to operate using American infrastructure, allegedly to be monitored by the intelligence community. However, while this monitoring goes on, the Islamists' hate propaganda continues to poison the minds of millions worldwide, and the terrorists go on killing. (FrontPage Magazine)
See also Marketing Terror: How Hizballah Spreads Incitement and Hate on Al Manar TV
Hizballah broadcasts a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week stream of Iran-inspired propaganda to North America via the Al Manar TV channel, using the American company Intelsat's Telestar 5 satellite. Broadcasts to Europe and North Africa are made via Eutelsat of the European Space Agency, now operated by a private French company. Additional Al Manar broadcasts are carried to North Africa and Europe by the American firm New Skies Satellites. Al Manar broadcasts to the Middle East on Arabsat, owned largely by Saudi Arabia. (Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies-Hebrew)
See also Al Manar TV: Hizballah's Powerful Tool for Spreading Radical Islam, Anti-Semitism, and Support for Terror
(Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center-Hebrew)
See also Online and Even Near Home, New Front in the Terror Fight
An Internet company in Clifton, N.J., called Fortress ITX unwittingly played host to an Arabic-language website where postings in recent weeks urged attacks against American and Israeli targets. "The Art of Kidnapping" was explained in electronic pamphlets, along with "Military Instructions to the Mujahedeen," and "War Inside the Cities." Visitors could read instructions on using a cellphone to remotely detonate a bomb, and one even asked for help in manufacturing small missiles.
(New York Times)

To Survive, Israel Will Have to Strike Nuclear Iran - Michael Costello
Sometime in the next year or two, Israel is going to have to make a decision. Will it accept that Iran has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them against Israel? Or will it do what it did to Iraq's developing nuclear capability in 1981 and bomb it out of existence? Does it allow an implacable enemy determined to obliterate it as a nation to develop the means by which it can achieve that end? Or does it rely on the international community to protect it? (The Australian)
For a contrasting view, see The Nuclear Sum Game - Reuven Pedatzur
Israel has no chance to eliminate Iran's nuclear program by force. The nuclear facilities are dispersed, most are buried deep underground, and there is no information on many of them. Israel should leave the job to the United States, in the hope that the Europeans will come to their senses and understand the danger to world peace posed by a nuclear Iran.
(Ha'aretz)
See also The Iran Dilemma - George F. Will (Washington Post)

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Wednesday that the issue of Iran's development of nuclear weapons should be moved quickly to the UN Security Council "to put an end to this nightmare."

"We know that the Europeans are trying now to engage with the Iranians, but we know that the Iranians will never abandon their plans to develop nuclear weapons. They're only trying to hide it."

"For many years, the world believed that this threat from Iran could be launched only toward Israel. But the Europeans realize that the Iranians are developing missiles with a range that will include Paris, London, Berlin, and southern Russia."

"We are trying to do everything we can in order to convince the members of the IAEA...to take the right decision to move it to the Security Council, and after it, of course, for the Security Council to impose sanctions against Iran if it does not comply."